UC Berkeley’s flagship institute for social science research

Our purpose is captured in our name: we provide an organizational framework—a “matrix”—that supports cross-disciplinary research pursued by social scientists across the University of California, Berkeley campus and beyond.

Matrix Lecture

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Event Date: December 4th, 2025
4:00pm-5:30pm

Alexis Madrigal: “To Know a Place”

In this Matrix Distinguished Lecture, journalist Alexis Madrigal — host of KQED's Forum and a contributing writer at The Atlantic — turns his attention to the question of how we come to know a place. Drawing on his background as a reporter, writer, and thinker of cities, landscapes, and histories, he will explore different ways of writing about and understanding place, revealing how perspective, memory, and narrative inform the stories we tell about the world around us.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published September 3, 2014

Snapping Back from Disaster

UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management seeks new approaches for mitigating the impacts of disasters on large-scale infrastructure systems.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

ADHD Explosion

UC Berkeley Professors Stephen P. Hinshaw and Richard M. Scheffler argue that ADHD must be understood as a result of both social conditions and biology.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

A Critical Take on Cities

UC Berkeley's Critical Urbanisms Working Group draws upon diverse disciplines to re-examine cities and how they are planned and managed.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Invited Interventions

Research by UC Berkeley Political Scientist Aila Matanock sheds light on why state-building interventions succeed in some nations and not others.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Take No Prisoners

Through overcrowding, lockdowns, and medical neglect, the conditions in U.S. prisons have become unconstitutional, according to UC Berkeley legal scholar Jonathan Simon.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Decline of the City-State

UC Berkeley historian Mark Peterson writes about the prominence—and ultimate decline—of city-states, using 18th- and 19th-century Boston as an example.

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